Despite experimentation with X-Ray technology applied to the diagnosis of paintings in German science laboratories in the first decade of the twentieth century, it was only in the 1920s and 1930s that the technology became more widely and systematically applied to art. Alan Burrough’s acquisition of the first and extensive archive of X-ray images of paintings, first of the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the most important driving force behind this. Burrough’s efforts were inspirational for Kurt Wehlte, the German Maltechniker, who in the 1930s established a laboratory for the X-Ray investigation of paintings in Berlin. In this talk, Professor Dupré will speak about how and in which ways X-ray investigations of paintings were consequential for art history.

The figures of Africans in the early modern arts trouble the traditional chronology and geography of art history and sometimes disturb the hierarchical circulation of commodities between European metropolises and colonial territories. One cannot study art of colonial times and places with the exact same categories used to define the Italian Renaissance, the British Landscape and even the mobile case of El Greco. Authorship, centre versus periphery, the picture, the unicum… all these units need to be renegotiated in the imperial context. This lecture will focus on these issues through case studies based on the painting of female black figures in France and the French Americas at the end of the Eighteenth Century and in the first decades of the Nineteenth Century.

Durning-Lawrence Chair of History of Art
Department of History of Art,

University College London (UCL)

London, 1 March 2017, 5:30 pm

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) here.

This lecture looks at a remarkable photograph taken by the South African war correspondent in WW2, Constance Stuart (Larrabee) at the moment of the liberation of France. The photograph, one of nine in a series, depicts one of the femmes tondues the sheared women collectively punished for having ‘associated with the Germans’. It is read in relation to other photographs in the series as well as the agenda of Libertas, the first picture magazine in South Africa, for whom Stuart worked. But there is more to Stuart’s relationship to the image than the need to document the occasion. What seeps out from the image is something that exceeds documentary’s desire, inadvertently articulating both the photographer’s and the protagonist’s position in history.

Chair for Early Modern Art
Kunsthistorisches Institut
University of Zürich

Rudolf Wittkower Visting Professor
Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome

London, 8 February 2017, 5:30 pm

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) here.

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

One century from the first publication of one of the most influential books of art history, Heinrich Wölfflin’s „Principles of Art History“ of 1915, Professor Weddigen’s paper will explore one major part of its global reception: its impact on Hispanic and Latin American art and architectural history and aesthetics since the 1920s. The aim is to show how Kunstwissenschaft was translated, adopted, and appropriated for the construction of national, political, ethnic identities.

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) here.

Warburg Institute

Woburn Square

London WC1H 0AB

Professor Kuskawa will give a paper arguing for the importance of images as a versatile means of shaping and transmitting scientific knowledge in the early modern period. Traditionally, historians of science have looked to illustrations in early printed books as evidence of first-hand observation. But a large number of these illustrations, including those labeled as ‘ad vivum’, turn out to be images copied from elsewhere. Copying images was undertaken for a variety of reasons in the early modern period, including as a way to save time and money for the printers. Rather than a disappointing, inferior iteration of first-hand observation, I propose that copying was a necessary and versatile means of shaping and sharing scientific knowledge, but as with any form of transmission, copying entailed some process of transformation and translation. This paper will discuss the many different uses through which images came to constitute early modern scientific knowledge.

Paul Delaroche’s drawings and oil studies reveal his tendency to ponder a range of different iconographic sources over a long period.The preparation of his Moses on the Nile is a particularly interesting example, since some of the original drawings in the Louvre are customarily attributed to the early 1840s, while the large painting (originally in the collection of Baron James de Rothschild, but now lost) is dated 1853. A drawing that has recently come to light indicates Delaroche’s initial debt to the paintings on the subject by Nicolas Poussin.

Mechthild Fend, Reader in History of Art at University College London, will give a lecture on the migrations of the visual and mental image of Medusa between early modern art, French revolutionary prints and medical illustrations and discourses.

Roger Sabin, Professor of Popular Culture at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, will give a lecture on the way in which the new medium of comics was perceived by critics in the late 19th century, focusing on the UK (at the time the world-leading producer). The late Victorian period saw an increasingly intense discussion about ‘culture’ – what it was, and where it was heading – spurred by the growth of working class leisure pursuits, and middle class concerns about them. Weiterlesen →